Technical Images

Práca pojednáva o fenoméne technického obrazu a jeho vzťahu k umeleckej grafike v stredoeurópskom priestore. Skúma fenomény súvisiace s novými formami grafiky, prípadne s modifikáciou tradičných grafických techník v súvislosti so vstupom digitálneho obrazu na pole umeleckej grafiky. Mapuje časť rôznorodého spektra súčasnej grafiky so zameraním na diela a autorov, ktorí pri procese vzniku obrazu využívajú digitálne technológie. Výskum sa ďalej zameriava na dôsledky prenikania technického obrazu do umeleckej grafiky, ktoré sa postupne objavujú v diskusiách o grafike v umeleckých kruhoch, či na prehliadkach súčasnej grafiky. Reflektuje širšie umelecko-historické kontexty tohto fenoménu s ohľadom na vývoj fotografie a nových médií.

No existe certeza de la fecha exacta en que se programó esa imagen computacional, tan sólo sabemos que fue hacia fines de los 50. Lo cierto es que el registro data de 1959. Se trata apenas de la fotografía polaroid a una pantalla de computador, almacenada durante décadas como archivo, desclasificado recién en 2013. En tanto registro técnico -análogo- de otro acontecimiento técnico -digital-, esa foto polaroid ha adquirido también el estatus y relevancia de un suceso. Se trataría de la primera captura de pantalla de la que se tiene registro, antecedente genealógico, tal vez madre, de todas las capturas de pantalla que se han hecho después. Y aún más, a pesar de que la prensa ha hablado de esa foto polaroid como si se tratara de una mera anécdota, también ha dotado al acontecimiento registrado por la foto, de otros títulos inaugurales: primera obra de arte digital, primera imagen porno computacional, primera imagen humana de una pantalla interactiva. Se podría agregar: la primera foto de una imagen algorítmica, posando a la cámara.

Aller Kunstfertigkeit des Photographen und aller Planmäßigkeit in der Haltung seines Modells zum Trotz fühlt der Beschauer unwiderstehlich den Zwang, in solchem Bild das winzige Fünkchen Zufall, Hier und Jetzt, zu suchen, mit dem die Wirklichkeit den Bildcharakter gleichsam durchsengt hat, die unscheinbare Stelle zu finden, in welcher, im Sosein jener längstvergangenen Minute das Künftige noch heut und so beredt nistet, daß wir, rückblickend, es entdecken können.Auch jene Fotografie, die Walter Benjamin in seiner Kleinen Geschichte der Photographie zur vorangestellten Äußerung bewegt hat, macht nicht den Anschein des Zufälligen. Es handelt sich dabei um ein sorgfältig gestelltes Selbstporträt, auf dem sich der Fotopionier Max Dauthendey mit seiner Braut präsentiert (Abb. 1). Und doch fühlt sich Benjamin bemüßigt, ja gezwungen, in der inszenierten Atelieraufnahme ein Jenseits der Pose, eine Spur des vergangenen "Soseins" zu entdecken, das ihn in den Augen der Frau das zukünftige Schicksal lesen läßt: den Suizid der Frau nach der Geburt des sechsten Kindes. Daß es sich bei der abgebildeten Braut nicht um diese, Max Dauthendeys erste Frau handelt, sondern um jene, die er 1857 -zwei Jahre nach dem Tod der ersten Frau -heiratete, 3 scheint auf den ersten Blick lediglich Benjamins Lesart des Bildes als lächerliches Fantasma zu entlarven, das er Dauthendeys Biographie entnommen und sodann leichtfertig auf die Fotografie projiziert hat. Tatsächlich verdeutlicht dieser Lapsus, der aus dem Begehren herrührt, dem vergangenen Geschehen Materialität zu verleihen, besser als jede weniger leicht von der Hand zu weisende

Photo and video stitching have drawn a lot of intrest in the research field in the past years. Image stitching is a process in which different scenes images are overlapped together to form a new single one view image with high resolution. There are many techniques involes in image stitching. In this research paper various imagestitching techniques like SIFT, RANSAC, , SURF has been discussed and explained how they work.

I analyse five forms of images: electronic, digital, interactive, networked and living, all of which challenge traditional descriptions and expectations. I analyse them from the technical-ontological, phenomenological and cultural perspective to demonstrate different ways in which they discuss and deconstruct the notion of an image. Finally, I try to propose a new context for understanding the discussed forms of new imagery, i.e. the context of post-imagery.

Co-Author: Jochen Hennig, in: The Technical Image. A History of Styles within Scientific Imagery, ed. by Horst Bredekamp, Birgit Schneider, Vera Dünkel, copublished with the Bard Graduate Center, Chicago 2015, p. 70-74.

Anthology Reviews:
Barbara Kiser | Nature:  “This multidisciplinary study trains an art historian’s eye on historical scientific imagery. Editors Bredekamp, Dünkel, and Schneider draw on research from the Humboldt University of Berlin and a range of haunting images. They show that an iconic 1896 radiograph of a hand by X-ray discoverer Wilhelm Röntgen prompted both rhapsodies over a ‘photography of the invisible’ and frustration among medics struggling to use such images for diagnosis.”

Mirjam Brusius, University of Oxford, on the German edition | British Journal for the History of Science: “Not only is the objectivity of scientific images . . . challenged, but the accounts here of technical histories, evaluation practices, iconographical traditions, and modes of perception make even clearer the constructive character of the images. For all that such images are expected to be self-evident and to follow rules of repetition and verifiability, like experiments, it is nevertheless—or, even better, therefore—the case that manipulated images often generate better scientific results in the eyes of the scientists. . . . The volume deserves to be treated as an indispensable research tool.”

For more reviews check:
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo20278194.html

(= updated & translated version of: Repräsentationsketten, in: Horst Bredekamp, Birgit Schneider, Vera Dünkel (Hg.): Das Technische Bild. Kompendium für eine Stilgeschichte wissenschaftlicher Bilder, Berlin 2008, S. 96-99.)

Post-History of Vilém Flusser - Genesis-Anatomy-Developments aims at a presentation of the Czech-Brazilian philosopher's work, in which his concept of "post-history" underpins all his reflection on the contemporary media and society. The author shows how his early works from the sixties like "The history of the Devil" and "Language and Reality" prepare the field for the construction of the concept in the seventies - in works like "Communicology" -  and its full development in books such as "Post-History", "Towards a Philosophy of Photography" and "Into the Universe of Technical Images" in the eighties.

Philosopher Vilém Flusser has summarized the history of Western Culture in the following itinerary:
First, we left a “four-dimensional Lebenswelt”, creating three-dimensional objects and thus stepping into culture;
Then, we “stepped back into the imagination, to make images of objects”;
Afterwards, “we stepped back from imagination into contextual texts”;
And, finally, “we stepped back from description and culture and conception into calculation. Into zero-dimension.”
This description gives us an image of a linear process, in which Man is constantly stepping back from the direct experience of the world and going deeper and deeper into abstraction.
In his essay “Architecture as Drawing”, Alberto Pérez-Gómez highlights how the development of descriptive geometry, for instance, allowed architects to elaborate precise drawings that worked like instructions for the construction process. Architects could hen distance themselves from the building site, becoming “efficient designers” and thus stepping back from their traditional role as builders of architectural “objects”.
Away from the building site, architects imagined architectural objects, and, in order to build these objects, the mental images that prefigured it were translated into physical images, described and quantified. However, these man-made instructional images are now inserted into a world dominated by what Flusser calls “technical images”, that is, images created by devices such as cameras, TVs and computers  - and we interpret these images in a completely different way.
While watching some of these images - the live broadcasts of the 1989 Romanian Revolution -, Flusser identified an inversion in the way images were understood. In an age shaped by linear writing – that is, the age of History -, images were usually seen as “snapshots” of the historical process. However, these live images he saw on television were no longer a mere documentation of an event - now, it was the image that caused the events. Flusser believed that the goal of politics was “to be taken in an image” – as it was, for instance, the purpose of those who hijacked aircrafts. This inversion, he claimed, marked the end of History, inaugurating post-History – an age of “the (technical) image in power”.
In this context, the role of images in architectural production should also be inverted – at first, an imagined object was decomposed into images, in order to be communicated to others, understood and built; now, with the image in power, it is the image that will generate the building.
According to Pérez-Gómez, “When we speak about architecture, we refer to significant buildings that frame diverse cultural situations and enable their inhabitants to participate in the order of things. This ability is, of course, another definition of the poetic, the confluence of truth and beauty”. However, is this “poetic ability” still possible in the age of technical images? How can this inversion in the perception of images affect the creation and the perception of architecture? These are the questions that I will address in this essay, confronting Flusser’s concept of “technical image” with Pérez-Gómez’s inquiry on the poetic dimension of architecture.

As it is widely known, Vilém Flusser was an almost compulsive letter writer, having written, across his life, probably some thousands of letters of various sizes and formats, directed to many different receivers. Besides short texts, which often contained just quick news, some letters could be considered proper treatises, in which he approached both very freely and precisely the same topics in his theoretical essays, such as Post-History and Into the Universe of the Technical Images. So it is the case of his correspondence with Sérgio Paulo Rouanet - especially in the beginning of the eighties, in which both thinkers discuss in detail the then-new published book of Flusser on the post-history. Rouanet's position - sometimes quite critical - facing Flusser's work is presented and commented on in the first section of this text. His answer to Rouanet's criticism - sometimes very well-humored - appears in its second section.

Walter Benjamin´s "Work of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction" and Vilem Flusser´s Filosofia da caixa preta have defined photography as a key problem towards developing a philosophy of technology. I´ll discuss their concepts in relation to experimental practices in post-documentary photography which I consider a fertile ground to discuss the similarities and differences underlying different approaches to technology in Flusser and Benjamin. To contrast Benjamin´s mechanical reproducibility and Vilem Flusser´s technical images, I would like to analyse the processes of regaining an aura by means of a subversion of the photographic technology in contemporary photography. The creative intervention on the photographic camera, process and results involved in Argentinean photographer Seba Kurtis´ images of contemporary migrants offers an interesting case to discuss these problems.

Philosopher Vilém Flusser has summarized the history of Western Culture in the following itinerary: First, we left a “four-dimensional Lebenswelt”, creating three-dimensional objects and thus stepping into culture; Then, we “stepped back into the imagination, to make images of objects”; Afterwards, “we stepped back from imagination into contextual texts”; And, finally, “we stepped back from description and culture and conception into calculation. Into zero-dimension.” This description gives us an image of a linear process, in which Man is constantly stepping back from the direct experience of the world and going deeper and deeper into abstraction. In his essay “Architecture as Drawing”, Alberto Pérez-Gómez highlights how the development of descriptive geometry, for instance, allowed architects to elaborate precise drawings that worked like instructions for the construction process. Architects could hen distance themselves from the building site, becoming “efficient designers” and th...

Standing in the street market the Congolese immigrant told me the messenger mask he was selling me was supposed to establish a connection between different worlds. He repeated "before we had internet and cell phones, we had only such masks to talk to other worlds." This image of the African Mask as an intercessor between here and there was so strong and beautiful that it reminded me of the layers that link telematics to ancestral rituals to connect to the spirits and to the dead. This peculiar conversation in French between two foreigners in Berlin inspired me to create a performance associating ritual masks, video circuits and a projection screen, exploring the possibilities of becoming another through the process of communication. This article is a theoretical reflection on this ongoing practice based artistic research, bringing together Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's Amerindian perspectivism, Vilém Flusser's technical image and Gilbert Simondon's concept of techno-aesthetics.

E stamos enrascados! e o pior é que a maioria de nós sequer tem consciência disso. ou quando tem consciência, não está ciente de todas as consequências desse fato. uma explicação não alarmista para essa realidade remete à etimologia do adjetivo "enrascado": o substantivo que lhe deu origem, "rasca" caiu em desuso há muito tempo, mas os dicionários ainda fornecem o seu significado: "rede", no sentido mais literal possível, i.e., daqueles objetos que nos auxiliam na captura de, por exemplo, pescados. Portanto, um outro modo de dizer que não apenas os peixes e crustáceos que capturamos com a rasca, mas nós também estamos numa enrascada, seria afirmar que estamos "enredados". estamos enrascados também num sentido menos literal mas muito concreto, pois parte considerável da humanidade hoje é usuária da rede mundial de computadores e, naqueles momentos em que não está efetivamente conectada, está sujeita ao bombardeio das redes de rádio e Tv ou à influência de um sistema de relações muito assemelhado à trama de um tecido. sim, estamos "à rasca", como dizem os portugueses. Para conhecer melhor essa situação da qual nos tornamos agora cada vez mais cientes, seria interessante nos valermos de uma reflexão filosófica suficientemente elaborada para desvendar tanto os riscos quanto as promessas desse nosso enredamento.

El  documento resume una investigación de maestría en filosofía donde se estudia la relación entre la imagen y el concepto en el pensamiento flussereano, cuyos tránsitos entre uno y otro no son meramente formales o estructurales; los flujos entre la imagen y el concepto son también creativos. De manera tal que la tesis diferencia lo anterior a partir de concepto (Begriff) y 'concepto' (Konzept), respectivamente. Cabe agregar que este escrito fungió como base para una ponencia presentada en el VII Congresso Internacional de Comunicação e Cultura-São Paulo, el cual fue publicado en su anuario.

The biblical account begins by stating that on Earth a single language was spoken, with the same words and for this matter we are going to take for granted that also the same code which outcome into characters. According to the passage, this scenario provided the necessary conditions to ambition and to initiate the construction project that would touch or reach the sky. God, in the face of the threat of such enterprise revealing human ambition and pride " If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. " (Genesis 11: 1-9) thus preventing the realization of this project represented The human potential to perform any other purpose. For the purpose of this essay we will abstract the main elements, beginning with the communicational ones: a common language and therefore a common code, the confusion of it and the genesis of its multiplicity by consequence; Construction project or ambitious project, humans and God. And likewise God did, we are going to disperse the elements, as those who once had a common language were scattered. Vilém Flusser speaks of two types or degrees of imagination to describe and critique our mental process of abstraction and how our culture is assembled. The first degree of imagination or traditional imagination competes from how we relate and conceptualize in space-time until the development of discursive reason. This process raises in dimensions of abstraction, ranging from prehistory where the axis of our reason is space and movement, where logic operated by correlation of elements and gives rise to mythical thinking. This notion of the world preludes in 4 dimensions (4D), the phenomena on the fullness of space-time dimension. With the invention of tools and the manipulation of the environment, one of those dimensions, time, is abstracted to freeze a phenomenon and thus to understand it. On aims of understanding the phenomenon by "taking distance from the circumstance" subjectivity arouse and in this turn already " where the hands couldn't reach " ideology was edified. Upon that "alienation" we lost the concrete to gain amplitude (3D to 2D).

In the 2006 essay “What is an apparatus?”, philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes how the “gestures ... of individuals have been reshaped from top to toe” (2006: 15-16) by the mobile phone. The following year multinational technology company Apple announced the iPhone. This novel apparatus was presented in a keynote by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs who exhibited a proliferation of dexterous hand movements across an expansive touchscreen. This device, and its myriad versions, has proliferated to seeming ubiquity. With it, the top-to-toe reshaping of individuals through their gestures and behaviours first mentioned by Agamben has diffused itself through the widespread adoption of this particular mobile phone form factor. Ostensibly, a new gestural language has been developing alongside the development of the mobile phone. The gestural language between the individual and their device has increased in intensity over the past decade and this intensity has become so pronounced and so intense...

A morte de George Floyd, em Minneapolis no dia 25 de maio de 2020, vítima de violência policial, é mais um triste episódio da história do racismo na sociedade norte americana e da perpetuação do abuso de poder e da violência sistêmica contra a população negra. Nas mídias e redes sociais, as imagens que envolvem o caso de Floyd e descrevem os protestos que se seguiram ao redor do mundo, ocuparam a linha do tempo de milhões de usuários. Neste contexto da produção imagética dentro do ativismo virtual, este artigo utiliza como base a teorias da imagem, fotografia, linguagem para propor uma análise crítica sobre o movimento BlackoutTuesday como modalidade de manifestação política.

A partir del diagnóstico benjaminiano sobre la politicidad de los medios
técnicos de reproducción de imágenes, y desde una consideración
crítica de la tecnocultura, querríamos mostrar que es con las imágenes
técnicas y no contra ellas como se podría considerar aun la posibilidad
de un arte activista o con horizontes libertarios. Tanto Foucault como
Deleuze y Guattari parecen afirmar esto a través de un uso distorsivo de
las imágenes y enunciados, anclados en la consideración crítica de los
dispositivos técnicos en los que se anudan. Tomaremos dos intervenciones artísticas que con sus matices pueden leerse bajo la lógica anfibia del manifiesto: el texto “Un arte de los medios de comunicación” redactado por Jacoby, Escari y Costa, y la primera película de Harun Farocki, El fuego inextinguible.

In this philosophical research, I will focus on the relationship between image and concept in Vilém Flusser’s thought. Such relationship will not be regarded here as merely formal or structural, but rather as creative. The latter especially happens in the margin where both interact. In this sense, I pose a distinction between concept as structure (Begriff) and concept as creation (Konzept).
In order to go through the above mentioned distinction, on the first chapter I will elaborate on imagination from a Flusserean point of view, specifically through his constitutive concepts of gesture, code, and image. The main argument to be sustained is that gestures establish an instrumental and technical link with images through codes.
On the second chapter, I will introduce the concept of apparatus that is a medium between gesture and image. This philosophical category is defined as a technical system constituted by codes, especially alpha-numeric ones. From a Cartesian and philosophical point of view, these codes express concepts insofar as they are clear and distinct. For that reason, the apparatus also has this same conceptual quality.
Finally, on the third chapter I will deepen technical imagination, particularly the relationship between gesture and image through apparatus. This relation is characterized by two concepts: position-taking and play, the latter in turn is disaggregated into other concepts such as dialogue, creation, noise, and margin. These set of concepts make up the central argument of the research, i.e. that concept is also a form of creation and conception. As an illustration and form of reflection of the aforementioned thesis, I will examine two contrasting examples: max point and Benny’s Video (1992).

Para el filósofo de la comunicación Vilém Flusser los aparatos digitales incorporan en su programación una lógica interna de funcionamiento, de manera que no es el usuario quien circunscribe el uso del dispositivo, sino que es el propio dispositivo técnico el que delimita las competencias del usuario.
El diseño discriminatorio del dispositivo técnico es capaz de indicarle a la policía qué área patrullar; a los jueces, qué penas imponer; a los corredores de bolsa, cuándo comprar o vender. El algoritmo como función determinante de un mundo cuantificado en la estadística tiene el poder de imponer los límites y las formas de lo normativo, influyendo en los modos que asume lo real, creando una malla, filtro, o red epistemológica en los vínculos mediatizados de lo real.
El nodo central de este texto apunta a dilucidar en qué nivel de competencia tecnológica debe operar el usuario para no estar condicionado por las imposiciones del algoritmo, y la importancia generativa del bien común.

Harun Farocki é um nome conhecido no cinema e na arte contemporânea. Enveredou por ambos os campos, associado a filmes de diferentes durações e videoinstalações em película, vídeo e imagem computadorizada. Guerra, política e economia são alguns dos temas definidos, conectados entre si por uma busca incessante pela construção de um olhar histórico através das imagens. Este texto investiga a questão da liberdade na poética tecnológica de Farocki, através da análise interpretativa das instalações Interface (1995) e Paralelos (2012-2014). Essa investigação do seu gesto poético visa contribuir com uma pesquisa mais ampla sobre as relações entre arte e política no contexto atual, no qual a informática e a telemática são aproveitadas predominantemente para uma difusão de imagens clichês.

FREEDOM IN HARUN FAROCKI'S TECHNOLOGICAL POETICS

Harun Farocki is a name known in cinema and contemporary art. He pursued both fields, associated with films of different durations and video installations in film, video and computer image. War, politics and economy are some of the their themes, linked together by an incessant search for the construction of a historical look through images. This text investigates the issue of freedom in Farocki's technological poetics, through the interpretative analysis of the installations Interface (1995) and Parallels (2012-2014). This investigation of his poetic gesture aims to contribute to a broader research on the relations between art and politics in the current context, in which information technology and telematics are used predominantly for the diffusion of cliché images.

With a view to compliment of the superficiality of tecnoimages of the Vilém Flüsser, trespassed by the critique to the modern technique’s scientificism, undertaken by Martin Heidegger, seeks to better understand the meaning of the images produced by appliances and to point more extensive consequences of its use. The critic use of the tecnoimages as material for the current production of art by the strategies of appropriation directs the reflections to the concept of simulacra of Jean Baudrillard. It’s relates finally the tecnoimages, coming from the modern technique, to the meaning of the “copy without an original” as a simulacra.